Community Service
by Tynesider
Summary: To Cairo, Spyro isn't as great as others make him out to be. OneShot, rated for one use of strong language.


Cairo trudged through the overgrown grass of Midnight Mountain and examined the monumental task ahead. The place was a wreck: turf growing freely; walls crumbling and portals faded and eroded by the rain. Even the many islands the realm sat on seemed to tilt threateningly, eager to offload their cargo of neglect. Cairo was keen to prevent this from happening, but the only problem with that was that he had been appointed to do such a thing. Single handed.

He had protested, of course, as tidying up Midnight Mountain was far from a single person's job. He was told he should have thought of that before he had started indulging in graffiti. Well, that was the reason given, but he knew for a fact that what he had done was art. He had been up all night painting that serpent! It was hardly a childish doodle! He had saved up for weeks to buy all the shades of colour needed for it, and on top of that he had spent another fortnight planning its layout. It had been over a month of hard graft just to get to the painting, but in the end it had been worth it, and once the morning arrived the whole of the Tomb had been captivated by his artwork. Unfortunately, the authorities were less than impressed by the fact he had painted over ancient carvings detailing the rise of the kingdom within the Tomb, and was promptly arrested and tried.

His defence was that everything on the walls were carvings, so by painting on them he was only adding to artwork that was already there, but the Judge wasn't fooled and deemed his work to be defacing a piece of important history. He was found guilty and sentenced to three months of community service, which just so happened to be tidying up the wreck that was Midnight Mountain.

He pushed his cart through the thick blades of glass, heading in the direction of one of the few buildings around the place. It was always Midnight here, yet somehow the air was as humid and sticky as the midday sun. Salamanders darted around happily through the undergrowth, the warm air a pleasure to their slimy hides, but Cairo was sweating relentlessly. He wiped his brow for the umpteenth time, halting the progress of a waterfall erupting from his forehead. Why was it so hot here? Even the Tomb wasn't as bad as this! He tore off his hat to give his head some fresh air, flapping his ears to fan some life back into his scalp. If he didn't live to see the end of his community service it was a toss-up over what he would die of: overwork or dehydration.

He wheeled the cart into the building and surveyed the scene. The tiles on the floor were split evenly between being cracked and being faded, with some fulfilling both. He groaned and replaced his hat - it would take him a week at the least to replace all of these, and that didn't include the numerous trips he would have to make to Haunted Tomb to collect more tiles. In his pained eyes the floor seemed to expand into a never-ending tunnel of continuous graft, tiles as far as the eye could see with anything else practically invisible. His brain screamed for an excuse to get out of such a hellish ordeal, but there was none. Begrudgingly, he set to work.

He collected his first batch of tiles from the Tomb and began peeling the old ones from the floor. The mortar beneath crumbled as he lifted the ceramic squares clear, dancing in the air at liberation from the floor. He tossed them aside and began to lay down fresh cement, carefully positioning the tiles on top and scraping away the excess in a motion that became repetitive as he lay down tile after tile.

The hours ticked away, but he didn't notice. It was hard to do so with nothing rising or setting in the sky. He continued his graft hopelessly, cutting his canine fingers on the volatile shards of ceramic and drawing tiny trickles of blood. But he pressed on even though his back ached and his legs had gone numb from continuous kneeling, though as his stack of tiles depleted he noticed he hadn't even covered a tenth of the floor.

He paused for a short rest and looked around him, jumping slightly in shock at the sight of the great wooden doors. He had been so enveloped in his work he had failed to notice that this was the building where the portal to the Sorceress' Lair resided. He couldn't help but sneer at the sight of it. She was long gone, booted out by the purple dragon months ago, and the portal had been barricaded ever since. He had been indifferent to the Sorceress, and while all the Earthshapers were certainly pests they had never really got in his way.

Plus, the woman had employed her Rhynocs to tend to the worlds and keep them in good order. He remembered the sight of Rhynocs polishing and repairing the Tomb until it sparkled beyond its thousand-year history. The hedges in Midday Gardens had been pruned lovingly, the crumbling towers given a new coat to bring back their glamour. Okay, the Sorceress was mad, but she had improved the look of the Forgotten Worlds phenomenally.

But now she was gone, and the world had fallen into a state of disrepair. All the plants were overgrown, the stone and brick slowly collapsing around them. The Forgotten Worlds were a shadow of their former selves: broken, unkempt, unloved. And what had the dragon done? Buggered off back to wherever he came from and left the apathetic locals to clean up the mess. Or not, as this hideous building clearly showed.

Cairo set back to work relaying the floor, but stopped abruptly as he saw scratch marks on the tiles in front of him. Three even scrapes torn into the ceramic, all parallel to one another with no evidence of a thumb. The scrapes could only have been made by one creature: a dragon.

A rush of anger clouded his head. He tore the tile free from its mortar and flung it at the wall behind him. It shattered with a loud crash, a high-pitched chime filling his sensitive ears.  
>"That bloody dragon's ruined everything!" he screamed to the heavens, not caring if there was anyone around to hear him. It was true: if it weren't for that dragon he wouldn't be here single-handedly replacing the entire floor. He might have spent a brief time in prison instead, but it was preferable to this backbreaking chore. The dragon had liberated him from the Sorceress but imprisoned him in a completely new jail of disrepair and neglect.<p>

Many people would disagree with him, of course, but as he looked out across the tangled mass of awfulness formerly known as Midnight Mountain he was utterly convinced that he was right.


End file.
